Firmware Update for OCZ SSD drives on a Mac by falko
29 09 2011I’ve got an OCZ Vertex3 MaxIO SSD as the main drive in my MacBook Pro. Now there is a firmware upgrade available from OCZ. As with many other vendors these kind of updates are only supported on Windows or Linux (at least), but not directly on a MacOS X. So what now?
I found a fairly easy way to do the upgrade. OCZ provides a Linux based update tool that downloads the actual firmware on demand from their website. So you need a computer that can run Linux, has internet connectivity and the drive accessible via a controller that allows the update.
Of course you can’t update the firmware of the drive you’ve booted from. So I just took a Ubuntu Linux Live CD and booted my MacBookPro (press C during boot) from the CD. From Linux I downloaded the firmware update pack from the OCZ website and ran in it a terminal.
This worked like charm. Hard disk was recognized, appropriate firmware update downloaded and disk updated. Done. No need to put your hard drive in another computer that runs the support OS or any other fiddling.








thanks for your post.
i tried what you wrote.
i downloaded ubuntu, burned to CD and booted my macbook pro from the cd.
then i downloaded the ocz vertex 3 linux fwupd file in ubuntu using firefox.
i cannot seem to open it in terminal. when i double click the .zip file, i get an error message. the file i downloaded from ocz website was fwupd_v2.12.05.zip.
thanks for any help
thanks for the info. I tried the same but I always get the following message:
Firmware Update FAILED on /dev/sda: drive OCZ-Vertex 3
What can I do? My internet connection works on UBUNTU.
Please help me.
Thanx
Sorry… I missed these comments here
@Jack: you have to manually unzip the file you downloaded from the OCZ website. The go into the folder and run the update utility.
@Daniel: that’s the only error message you get? What MacBook Model do you have? And is the SSD connected to the SATA port where your original hardware was?